The pervasive corporate media
bubble, which grossly distorts the views most Americans have
of the world beyond their
shores, and of life in America’s black one-eighth, operates to
fool African Americans, too. While a fortunate few of us are doing
very well indeed, and many more are hanging on as best we can,
the conditions of life for a substantial chunk of black America
are not substantially improving, and appear to be getting much
worse. This is a truth which can’t be found anywhere in the corporate
media, but it is nevertheless one with which we must familiarize
ourselves in preparation for the upcoming national black dialogue. It
is high time to begin constructing useful indices with which to
measure the quality of life, not just for a fortunate few, but
for the broad masses of our people in America’s black one-eighth.

Measuring the quality of life in black America

Painting an accurate picture is not difficult. Useful measures
of family income and cohesiveness, of home ownership, life expectancy,
education levels, of unemployment and underemployment abound. But
among all the relevant data on the state of black America today
one factor stands out: the growth of America’s public policy of
racially selective policing, prosecution, and mass imprisonment
of its black citizens over the past 30 years. The operation
of the crime control industry has left a distinctive, multidimensional
and devastating mark on the lives of millions of black families
and on the economic and social fabric of the communities in which
they live.

About half the nation’s 2.2 million prisoners are black. With
only 36 million of us, that’s an astounding 3% of African Americans,
counting all ages and both sexes, languishing behind bars, with
a roughly equal number on probation, parole, house arrest or other
court supervision. Almost one in three 18-year-old black males
across the board is likely to catch a felony conviction, and in
some communities nearly half the black male workforce under 40
have criminal records. A felony conviction in America is a stunningly
accurate predictor of a life of insecure employment at poverty-level
wages and no health care, of fragile family ties, of low educational
attainment and limited or no civic participation, and a strong
likelihood of re-imprisonment. Each month, tens of thousands of
jobless, skill-less, stigmatized and often anti-socialized ex-prisoners
are released back into communities that lack job and educational
opportunities, where intact families are more the exception than
the rule, and where upward social mobility is a myth.

Clearly, more than any other single public
policy, the day to day operation of America’s crime control industry magnifies and
exacerbates racial inequality, deepens black poverty, and wreaks
widespread destabilization on black families and communities. Among
the many scholars and researchers who have persuasively argued
and extensively documented these conditions is Dr. Paul Street
of the Chicago Urban League in “The
Vicious Circle: Race, Prison, Jobs and Community in Chicago,
Illinois and the Nation.”

So if you want to know where black families
fare the worst, where the lowest wages and life expectancy are,
where to find the highest
unemployment and the greatest number of single parent households
among African Americans, you don’t need an online survey. You
certainly don’t count the black businesses or the black elected
officials. You count the black prisoners, and the former prisoners,
and the ruined communities they come from and are discharged into. That’s
what BC did, and here are the results.

The Ten Worst States in the US to be Black

Wisconsin leads the nation in the percentage
of its black inhabitants under lock and key. Just over four percent of black Wisconsin,
including the very old and the very young of both sexes, are behind
bars. Most of the state’s African Americans reside in the Milwaukee
area, and most of its black prisoners are drawn from just a handful
of poor and economically deprived black communities where jobs,
intact families and educational opportunities are the most scarce,
and paroled back into those same neighborhoods. So Wisconsin,
and in particular the Milwaukee area justly merit the invidious
distinction of the Worst Place in the Nation to be Black.

Iowa, with only a small black population, is
not far behind. The
crime control industries in Wisconsin and Iowa seem to have learned
to make the most efficient use of the preferred human material
available to them, locking up the few black inhabitants of those
states at a rate 11.6 times higher than whites.

Texas, the nation’s second largest state, is the third worst place
to be black in America, and is in a class by itself, first because
its extraordinary rate of black incarceration affects such a large
population. Only New York has more African Americans than Texas,
and only the two relatively small states previously mentioned lock
up a higher percentage of their black citizens. Though California
has 50 percent more people, Texas has a slightly larger prison
population and only a 5 to 1 ratio between its black and white
rates of imprisonment. We may safely assume that since very few
of its wealthy Texans are behind bars, Texas is just a very bad
place to be poor, whether you’re black or not.

A total of 900,000 African Americans live in Oklahoma, Arizona,
Delaware, Nevada, Oregon and Colorado, and another 2 million-plus
in California, where the proportion of prisoners among total African
Americans hovers just under 3 percent.

How Much Better is Better? How Much Worse is Worst?

The answer in both cases is, unfortunately:
not much. Only one
hundredth of a percentage point separates Iowa’s 3.30% rate of
black incarceration from that of Texas, with 3.29%. Twenty-seven
more states manage to lock up between 2 and 3% of their African
American inhabitants, and only Maine, Hawaii and North Dakota fail
to incarcerate more than 1.55% of blacks. For whites, the national
average ratio of prisoners to the general population is less than
4 tenths of one percent.

The damning truth laid bare once again by this
fact, is that America’s
policy of racially selective policing, prosecuting and imprisonment
of its black one-eighth is a truly consistent and national one,
even though it is implemented with arbitrary severity by countless
state and local authorities.

Dishonorable Mentions

This distinction goes to New Jersey, Connecticut,
Minnesota, Pennsylvania, and New York.

BC’s Dishonorable Mention is reserved for those
states not already enumerated which have the highest disparity
between black and white incarceration rates. Wisconsin and Iowa
belong here too, with disparity rates between 11 and 12 to one,
but they have already been mentioned. This dismal category is
especially significant because black populations in three of the
states with extraordinary disparity rates fall largely within the
New York City Metropolitan Statistical area, the largest concentration
of black people in North America. Suffice it to say that for practical
purposes, New York City and its environs are not that much better
a place to be black than Texas.

STATE...........BLACK-WHITE
DISPARITY

New Jersey............13.15
to one

Connecticut...........12.77
to one

Minnesota.............12.63
to one

Pennsylvania..........10.53
to one

New York..............
9.47 to one

The second largest concentration of African
Americans in New Jersey lies within the Philadelphia Metropolitan
Statistical Area. Note
Pennsylvania’s fourth place ranking on the Dishonorable list.

The “enlightened” state of Minnesota has two more peculiar distinctions. First,
it commits one of the nation’s largest percentages of offenders
to community corrections, the generic name for “non-prison” sentencing
alternatives. With one of the nation’s highest rates of disparity
between its black and white inhabitants, it appears that Minnesota’s
white offenders are disproportionately funneled into alternative
sentencing situations, but we have no data to support such a conclusion. Secondly,
according to the Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics,
which together with the US Census Department is the source for
all numerical data in this article, Minnesota had the fastest growing
prison population in the country as of mid-year 2004, the latest
date for which stats are publicly available.

What About the South?

Alert readers may have noticed that except for Delaware and Texas,
not a single southern state made BC’s Ten Worst
or its Dishonorable Mention, even though Louisiana is well known
to have the nation’ highest per capita rate of incarceration for
its whole population. How is this possible?

The answer is that our ranking is based solely
on the percentage of a state’s black population behind state and local prison walls. The
following table sorts the top 13 states in order of their relative
black populations, from Mississippi with 36% to Illinois with 15%.
This statistical approach catches all the states of the old South
except Texas and Florida, and reveals an interesting pattern.

All eleven southern
states in this table lock up noticeably higher per capita numbers
of their
whole populations, black, white and otherwise, than do New York
and Illinois. But southern rates of disparity between black
and white imprisonment do not approach those of Illinois at 7.5
to one or New York’s 9.5 to one. Like Texas, nine of these eleven
Southern states achieve their overall high imprisonment rates
by confining white people to prison twice as often as New York
and Illinois. Furthermore, the five states with the highest
black percentage of their total populations have rates of black
imprisonment closer to those of Illinois and New York than to
Texas. Like Texas, the Old South is just not a good place
to be poor, whether one is black or white.

Federal Prisoners: Another Texas and then some

Finally, discerning readers have probably noticed
that near the beginning of this article the proportion of all
African Americans
in the nation’s prisons and jails was given as about 3%, but the
numbers quoted for only three states reached or exceeded that figure. How
did we get three percent?

The missing incarcerated, who did not figure in BC’s
calculations for the Dishonorable Mentions and Ten Worst list because BC was
unable to sort out their states of origin, race or region, are
those in federal prisons and jails. The federal gulag held about
170,000 people as of mid-year 2004, according to the Bureau of
Justice Statistics, slightly more than the Texas prison system,
and growing much faster. We have not yet obtained racial breakdown
data for federal prisons, but if and when it becomes available
it may show racial disparities as severe as those in Illinois,
which would suffice to make almost half of federal inmates African
American.

Better Lives, Better Families, Better Communities

The work of reclaiming lives, families and
communities shredded by America’s incarceration binge must take place in hundreds of
cities and towns and in several arenas. Thousands of churches
and local organizations are trying with scant resources to provide
re-entry services to former prisoners. While their efforts deserve
praise and support, BC believes that problems
created by bad public policies demand solutions that include changing
those destructive policies. In fact, it is misleading and foolish
to portray the problem of racially selective mass imprisonment
as one addressable by a million individual solutions, by several
hundred thousand family solutions, or by ten thousand black church
and small business solutions.

The problem is that public policy in America only moves in the
direction of addressing human needs when under the insistent pressure
of mass
movements. Where will the mass movement come from to change
America’s racially selective policy of mass incarceration? What
will be its first tasks, and what will it look like? These are
among the key questions before black activists between now and
the time we “Go
back to Gary.”